Nothing is more humbling than hearing your own voice in a video. I have done voiceovers for videos since I was in middle school, and I still can’t stand the sound of my own voice. The biggest issue I have with recording my own voice is hearing how I draw out my S’s. I have been told it’s a characteristic of my St. Louis accent, which I still don’t think is real, from a linguistics friend of mine. Lucky for me, I have a way to fix all the filler words and awkward silences when I record myself. That tool happens to be Adobe Audition! Unlike Photoshop, Audition had a much smaller learning curve to it. Our first tutorial was nice and simple, record ourselves saying the numbers one through ten in a random order and reordering them using Audition. This was super easy to do using the razor tool. I simply cut out each section of sound in the multitrack display and reordered them in another track. Next, I added in some music at the beginning and end of the counting and had it fade into the counting and back out at the end. I was also able to lower the decibels of the music during my counting since I have a softer voice and my microphone can be finicky.
Kyle Rolfes · Tutorial #1 Counting Out of Order
Kyle Rolfes · Tutorial #1 Counting Edited
The next tutorial was taking a small 3-minute interview with my fiancé, Liz, and cutting it down for time with an intro. To preface, this interview took place at 10 PM and I may have sprung some questions on her she was not anticipating. I asked three questions about her thoughts surrounding the Missouri outdoors and picked a small section where she talked about glades to use as my complete thought. There were many “likes” & “ums” throughout the interview from both Liz and myself, with many of them being easy to eliminate. The ones I had the hardest time splicing were ones with a voice pitch change. This was much harder to smooth out, but I think I did a much better job than I first thought I did. Another part of this interview that wasn’t recorded was reading over the question and answering a few times before pressing the record button. I would be lying if I didn’t say the full interview, you see here wasn’t 5th take!
Kyle Rolfes · Tutorial #2 Interview Original
Kyle Rolfes · Tutorial #2 Interview Edited for Time
For my Audition project, I plan on using a format very similar to the Tutorial #2 interview. I listen to a lot of forestry and nature podcasts, and the authenticity of people answering questions about a topic they love is always so enjoyable to hear as a listener. While the format is simpler than that of a news segment or a short story, I think there are some fun ways I can spice up an interview using Audition. If you have any questions on the Missouri outdoors, you would like me to ask the interviewees please leave a comment and I would be delighted to ask! Can’t wait to see what other people have to say on the MO Nature Podcast!